However, I think we've got some tactical disagreements on how to actually make society a better place. Namely, I think Sean is right if you have to remain an employee, but many people just don't have to do that, so it feels a bit like a great guide on how to win soccer while hopping on one leg. Just use two legs!
My own experience, especially over the last year, has been telling me that being positioned as an employee at most companies means you're largely irrelevant, i.e, you should adopt new positioning (e.g, become a third-party consultant like me) or find a place that's already running nearly perfectly. I can't imagine going back to a full-time job unless I was given a CTO/CEO or board role, where I could again operate with some autonomy... and I suspect at many of the worst places, even these roles can't do much.
Also Sean, if you're reading this, we'll get coffee together before March or die trying.
Cynics feel smart but optimists win.
You have to be at least a little optimistic, sometimes even naive, to achieve unlikely outcomes. Otherwise you’ll never put in enough oomph to get lucky.
Win.. what?
> enough oomph to get lucky.
The underpaid cargo cult mentality is alive in well in corporate America.
Nothing but pseudo "grindset" cargo cultists as far as the eye can see writing worthless technical platitude posts.
It feels like a parody site of itself these days.
Depends what you want to win?
You won’t have happy kids and a good family life, if you don’t think it’s possible. Same as you won’t make a cool open-source library, if you aren’t optimistic (or naive) enough to go work on that.
And if you keep saying everything is impossible a huge drag extremely worthless and why even bother trying, you won’t get the fun projects at work.
This is quite a straw man. I think a lot of engineers believe that other parts of the org lack perspective, sure. I’ve certainly seen managers or salespeople genuinely convinced that they’re delivering value when I know for a fact they’re selling snake oil. But I never assume it’s in bad faith, just an artifact of a shitty feedback and communication culture. People want to do good work, they just don’t often get good signal when they aren’t.
"Straw man" strictly speaking means something you invented, although, yes, that is likely overly strict, since you can find someone saying just about anything. But 20%? That's a substantial fraction of the relevant population!
The other thing worth noting here is that the point of a straw-man fallacy is. In a straw-man fallacy, you replace your opponent's argument with a ridiculous version, and argue against that instead of what they actually said. Or, alternatively, it's where you are arguing against some general nebulous concept, and you instantiate it as something ridiculous -- which maybe someone is actually saying! -- and use your argument against the ridiculous version as an argument against the more general concept, tarring other versions by association. (The real solution here of course is to not argue about nebulous concepts like that in the first place, it's not a useful way of arguing, but that's another matter.)
But if you're not performing either of these types of substitution, if the ridiculous position is actually out there and you're simply arguing against it as it is and not trying to use it to substitute for something else or tar something else by association... then that's not a straw man, that's just people believing ridiculous things and you having to argue against them.
Isn’t this the most prosperous, peaceful, and just period in history like ever? What “hellscape”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
People who run large tech companies want one thing: to increase shareholder value. Delivering "good software" (a very, very squishy term) is secondary.
I don't even think "good" is a quantifiable or effective measure here. C-level executives are deviating from reality in terms of what they say that their products are capable of versus how their products actually perform. If you're a CEO shipping a frontier model that adds some value in terms of performing basic technical tasks while simultaneously saying that AI is gonna be writing all code in 3-6 months, you're only doing good by your shareholders.
I think Sean is right that, in the abstract, they prefer good software to bad software, but they won't make any sacrifices if those sacrifices require losing money or status. It's the same "do your what your manager wants" playbook, but run up to board level.
That's not preferring good software to bad software, though. In order for a value to be meaningful when expressed, it has to result in some kind of trade off. If you value honesty over safety but never are put in a situation where you have to choose between honesty and safety, then that value is fairly meaningless.
A lot of very cosplay/play-pretend (and sometimes expensive!) tactics I’ve seen in high level enterprise sales made a lot more sense after being exposed to these views. Lots of money spent on entire rooms that are basically playsets for high level execs to feel cool and serve no other purpose. Entire software projects executed for that purpose. I didn’t get it until those folks clued me in.
But otherwise I think it's spot on. Especially for Cxx specialized in keeping the ball running, they'll have no interest in understanding most of the business in the first place, they seem themselves as fixers who just need to say yay or nay based on their gut feelings.
Well, a bunch of them are. From what one can hear about Elon Musk for example, at each of his companies there is an "Elon handler" team making sure that his bullshit doesn't endanger the mission and stuff keeps running [1], Steve Jobs was particularly infamous among employees [2] and family [3], Bill Gates has a host of allegations [4] even before getting into the Epstein allegations [5], and Trump... well, I don't think the infamous toddler blimp is too far off of reality.
> and insist that if you want to reach them and be understood you have to do the same.
That makes sense even for those who aren't emotional toddlers. At large companies it is simply impossible for any human to dive deep into technical details, so decisions have to be thoroughly researched and dumbed down - and it's the same in the military. The fact that people are allowed to hold positions across multiple companies makes this even worse - how is a board of directors supposed to protect the interests of the shareholders when each board member has ten, twenty or more other companies to "control"?
IMHO, companies should simply be broken up when they get too large. Corporate inertia, "too big to fail", impossibility to compete against virtually infinite cash coffers and lawyers - too large companies are a fundamental threat against our societies.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34012719
[2] https://qz.com/984174/silicon-valley-has-idolized-steve-jobs...
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daught...
[4] https://www.amglaw.com/blog/2021/07/both-microsoft-and-its-f...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
It's like saying that employees only want one thing: to get their paycheck.
So in a sense, Goedecke is right: Be a little cynical. Don’t bother with a veneer of the greater good or some other bullshit. Enjoy your paychecks while it lasts.
Indeed you are, for calling software developers “engineers” meanwhile software development is actually writing, so they are more closer to writers than engineers.
Consider this: math is mostly doodling some glyphs on paper, so clearly it is closer to drawing than engineering.
there are roughly 0.082% of software "engineers" that deal with these constraints or have to "think about them"
I don’t know if you’d label this view “cynical” or “idealist” but it feels balanced and I think there is a lot of truth in it. As a software engineer, you’re not a mindless automaton “just doing your job”. Your judgment about the proper way to do things—or whether a thing should be done like that at all—makes a difference in how useful and beneficial a product is for end users and for our society more broadly.
Idealism about one’s own behavior vs idealism about others’ behavior is an interesting tension to explore further.
The organisation he works for is implicated in surveillance, monopoly exploitation, and current military action involving particularly unpopular wars. No one forced him into this role - he could have made less money elsewhere but decided not to. He has decided to be a cog in a larger, poorly functioning machine, and is handsomely rewarded for it. This sacrifice is, for many, a worthwhile trade.
If you don't want to engage with the moral ramifications of your profession, you are generally socially allowed to do so, provided the profession is above board. Unfortunately, you cannot then write a post trying to defend your position, saying that what I do is good, actually, meanwhile cashing your high 6-7 figure check. This is incoherent.
It is financially profitable to be a political actor within a decaying monopolist apparatus, but I don't need to accept that it's also a pathway to a well-lived life.
Upton Sinclair
I have found that mentioning that, elicits scorn and derision from many in tech.
Eh. Whatevs. I'm OK with it (but it appears a lot of others aren't, which mystifies me).
I’ve found talking about ethics and moral responsibility with people working in big tech is futile and frustrating. Almost everyone takes it as a personal attack though I never hold anyone else to my moral standards.
Part of the tradeoff the parent comment references is a lack of thinking about the moral ramifications. Thus, when you mention your position which is grounded in that tradeoff's opposite, the reaction is not surprising. They are largely incompatible. Because your position hinges on a moral component, you are thus passing a moral judgement on others. This is often met with scorn, most especially because people have an aversion to shame, and it doesn't help if it's on the behalf of someone essentially randomly declaring they are morally better than you anytime the topic of their employment comes up.
So really, I'm not sure why you would be surprised, though I sympathize with your general sentiments, in a way you should know better. Surely you are aware of the aversion to shame writ large. That seems a logical predicate of your own conceptualization of your position.
I’m glad for the antitrust litigation. It’s very obvious that this was a collusion effort that was self serving to each party involved, as a means of overcoming a negative (for them) prisoners dilemma type situation.
The fact that it depressed wage growth was a welcomed side effect. But framing that as the intended outcome as a way of discrediting original author is telling. I don’t know if you’ve understood corporations to be rather simple profit seeking entities, whose behavior can be modeled and regulated to ideal societal outcomes accordingly.
What military action is GitHub involved with.
I didn’t make that same naive assumption when describing corpos as simple profit seeking entities, you just misunderstood what I was saying.
I will leave this world with no meaningful legacy, but that's preferable to exiting knowing that I'd directly helped Big Tech get bigger and even more evil.
If I'd had kids, maybe my calculus would have been different. Maybe I'd have been motivated enough for their futures to sacrifice my conscience for them, but I did not, and so all I had to consider was whether or not I'd be able to live with myself, and the answer for me was no.
There have always been enough decent, even well paying jobs in software outside of the Big Tech companies, even in Silicon Valley, and so paying my bills and saving for a good retirement didn't require the soul sacrifice.
I don't begrudge anyone who bit that lure but I am entirely content to have said no myself.
If you write proprietary code, everything you do dies with that company. I certainly don't want my life's work locked away like that. Working on OSS means a better chance to put the engineering first and do something that will last.
I did my few years and Silicon Valley too, and when it came to decide between money and code, I chose the code. Haven't regretted a thing.
I think helping make OSS a thing at all, especially in the very early days when my employer was seen as the poster child for its failure, will be the closest thing I have to a legacy. And I got to travel the world teaching about and evangelizing the open source process, tooling, and ethos which was great fun. I even got to play in the big leagues for a while, at the height of our consumer successes, and those years helped solidify some important industry standards that will certainly live on for a while.
I'm happy with my contributions, and happy with the comfortable life I achieved all while having a good time doing it. I'm also very happy that I got out a couple years ago before this latest wave of destruction.
There is no set future to what kind of technology we will build and end up with. We can build something where everything is locked away, and poor stewardship and maintenance means everything gets jankier or less reliable - or we can build something like the Culture novels, with technology that effectively never fails - with generations of advancement building off the previous, ever improving debugability, redundancy, failsafes, and hardening, making things more modular and cleaner along the way.
I know which world I'd rather live in, and big tech ain't gonna make it happen. I've seen the way they write code.
So if some people see my career as giving a middle finger to those guys, I'm cool with that :)
If doing things ethically (not defrauding investors and customers) keeps your manager happy, then do it. If not, do it fucking anyways.
Its baffling to see US engineers repeatedly being shat on by the company, and yet still retain belief in the chain of command.
But, to be a good cynic, you need a rich information network to draw on to see what the wider business is doing and thinking. You must understand the motivations of the business, so that you can be correctly cynical.
I disagree. Cynicism is a toxicity and will fester. Anecdata: I only know people that are either 0% cynical or 100% cynical (kinda like how people feel about Geddy Lee's voice).
>> Tech companies have a normal mix of strong and weak engineers.
Yes, that's not "a little cynical" that's a healthy perspective.
I think OP is really trying to tell people to be stoic, not cynical, and is confused on the vocabulary.
I must have a more diverse group of friends and colleagues because I see and experience the whole spectrum. Perhaps it's worth considering why your bubble is so black and white and maybe even how to change that.
However:
We DO live in a late-stage-capitalist hellscape.
Large companies ARE run by aspiring robber barons who have no serious convictions beyond desiring power.
I have compromised my principles by giving them (or anyone) my labor.
but I don't lie to myself or anyone else about it. I don't find any need to rehabilitate the structural and personal failings I encounter. When my friends call me out for working at EvilCorp, I don't argue. I know it's like any job: it's all dirty money. Instead, I deal with reality: weigh up pros and cons. I judge each year just how much Corporate I'm willing to swallow to support my dependents.
I enjoy the author's redefinition of cynicism and optimism. These are useful ideas to consider and I've given it some thought, arriving at an attitude of Becoming that I guess some would call idealism.
PS OMFG I just realised its MS. I believe this is what the kids call cringe.
Maybe, just maybe, when any single individual is unable to propose a product improvement due to the requirement of ass-kissing and favor-dealings involved... the company is too big and should (be) split up.
Corporate inertia is what is killing many a Western company against the competition from China.
This morning's aspiring robber baron fun (I think it's OK mention this, under the circumstances, so long as I don't say anything identifying)...
Responding to a cold outreach from a new startup, for which I happened to also have unusual experience in their product domain (no, you won't guess which). They wanted me to relocate to SF, as a founding engineer, and do a startup incubator with them.
Me: if you haven't even done the incubator, just to clarify, you want a founding engineer, not a co-founder?
Them: it will be good experience for you, to work alongside me to develop the product, and to see how the incubator works from the inside.
(This isn't really their fault. The incubator has started telling kids that they should work for one of the incubator's portfolio startups for the experience (certainly not for the salary and stock options), and then maybe one day they can be the Glorious Founder. And then new Glorious Founders, who might not yet know any better, simply regurgitate that.)
(I previously tried to talk with that same incubator, about this message that they were using, after they included it in a broadcast that also invited connecting with a particular person there. When I found a way to contact that named person, they ignored my question, and instead offered to delete my account on their thing, if I didn't like what they were saying. So I deleted my account myself. I'm not sure we really developed a collegial rapport and constructive shared understanding about the concern...)
I strongly disagree with this statement. What C-staff cares about is share-holder value. What middle management care about is empire building and promotions.
> for instance, to make it possible for GitHub’s 150M users to use LaTeX in markdown - you need to coordinate with many other people at the company, which means you need to be involved in politics.
You presented your point in a misleading way. I would classify this as collaboration/communication rather than politics.
Politics is when you need to tick off a useless boxes for your promo, when you try to to take credits for work you haven't helped with, when you throw your colleague under the bus, when you get undeserved performance rating because the manager thinks you are his good boy. There's a lot more, I didn't read any of your previous blogs, but all of these things are what engineers dread when we refer to politics.
Your just working for them for free rather than getting paid.
sleazebreeze•2h ago
mettamage•1h ago